zotero tab closes byitself and open a weired webpage, Report ID: 359194012

tchen22

Report ID: 359194012

2.1b7
Firefox 3.6.13
Mac 10.6.6

Now it is strange. Every time when I move an attached pdf file into a standalone item, the zotero tag available in the latest version of Zotero 2.1b just closes itself and the tab open itself into a strange website: falsehope.com. Have never seen this webpage before. This problem has never happened until today. Please help!

Also, it does not happen if I do the same thing when zotero is not a standalone tab, ie when it is below the web page (the old way seems fine).

Thanks!

Best.
Tsai

tchen22

I am sorry, I mean the zotero tab, not tag.

tchen22

After the problem persists, which makes me unable to edit my attachments, in addition to the annoyance, I upgraded to firefox 4. The issue is gone. Would it be related to firefox or some other more serious issue specific to my mac or some type of virus?

ajlyon

First-- I'm fairly sure Zotero itself also knows nothing of that site. Did this happen with every PDF you tried to attach?

This sounds like a malicious Firefox add-on, actually. Perhaps there was something that was fortunately disabled with the switch to Firefox 4.0.

tchen22

Thanks for the reply.

Yes I tried several different pdf.s, all to the same effects. Also, it was not attaching pdf. files. The pdf. has already been attached, it happens whenever I try to drag and drop those pdfs.

I have the following add-ons (all seems innocent i think):

disabled because of firefox upgrade:
firebug 1.6.2
pythonExt 2.6.2.20100203
Scaffold 2.0 2.0.0
XPather 1.4.5

still valid add-ons:

dom inspecter 2.0.8
feedback 1.0.4
zotero 2.1b7
zotero MacWord Integration 3.1b2
zotero openoffice.org integration 3.1b1
zoteroquicklook 1.1.0

I also have several plug-ins that are still valid after the upgrade.

Thanks! It seems that it only happens to me? I should be careful, then.

Best,
Tsai

crishoj

In my case, the strange website www.falsehope.com opens when I drag a PDF attachment "out" from e.g. a Zotero journal article item and try to drop it at the top level in the Zotero tree.

Using Firefox 3.6.13 on Mac OS X.

dstillman

Bizarre, but, as ajlyon says, there's absolutely no reference to that site in Zotero. That site does host mirrors of software, so this is presumably related in some strange way to something else you've downloaded. Or it could be a virus—falsehope.com appears to host security-related software as well, so maybe something opens the site up as a demonstration.

I'd be curious to see a Debug ID for the action that triggers this, though.

tchen22

Thanks Dan,

Debug ID is D1774649308

I reinstalled Firefox 3.6.13 and the problem came back so that I can produce this Debug ID.

I tried it on my laptop, the issue happens, too. On that firefox I have only Zotero installed as add-on.

Thanks!

Tsai

dstillman

Yeah, nothing helpful in there, but it sure is loading that web page.

Totally weird, but I'm afraid you're on your own here.

dstillman

An idea from Faolan: before it loads that page, watch the Firefox URL and status bars. It might be loading another (invalid) URL and being redirected to falsehope.com via a Google I'm Feeling Lucky search.

alex404

Hi there, I was directed to this post from here:

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/16583?page=1#Item_2

Dan: I came to the conclusion that 'false' is being sent to some website resolution, which takes you to false.com, which then redirects to falsehope.com

So I don't think it's anything malicious... it's still quite frightening though.

ajlyon

I think Alex wins the prize.

Simon

While I was unable to reproduce this issue exactly, I'm pretty sure I figured out the cause, and it should be fixed in the next Zotero release. It seems that when Zotero was open as a tab, Firefox was trying to load whatever was dragged within it. This only happened in Firefox 3.6, not Firefox 4, and so seems to be in agreement with the reports in this thread, and although I wasn't able to get Firefox to try to load something with a URI of false, I wouldn't be surprised if it were somehow possible.

If any of you are daring enough to try the Zotero trunk, it would be great to know if it gets rid of the issue. However, you should make sure to back up your data first and revert to Zotero 2.1b7 immediately afterward, as future changes may disrupt the stability of the trunk.

Davidovitch

I just ran into the same issue here (FF 3.6.14 on Ubuntu 10.04). And yes, it tried to load www.false.com, which ended up at falsehope.com. I tried to install the trunk (2.1b8.r8458) and the problem was gone. Falling back to 2.1b7 and falsehope.com came up again. It seems the problem is solved in the trunk version.

Looking forward to 2.1b8 or the final release ;-)

Thanks for this nice tool!!

tchen22

Some variance of the issue persist in 2.1 rc1 and Firefox 4.0.

The drag and drop of the pdf does not cause the attempt of loading a page, but if one drag the pdf file into the tag at the left pane in an attempt to add the tag, the app tab tries to load a page and thus falsehope.com is loaded again.

If I rename the file name of the pdf into some valid web address it will be loaded.

If I do this on a note, the message below shows:
Alert
The URL is not valid and cannot be loaded.

If I rename the note with a valid web address it will load.